Pages

Friday, September 28, 2012

Save the RT Profession!!!!

So it appears that the Michigan Office of Regulatory Reinvention (ORR) has "recommendedthe deregulation of 18 occupations -- among them respiratory care. It also recommends eliminating the Michigan Board of Respiratory Care. The ORR claims to have carefully considered the public health and safety benefits' of these occupations and determined that they do not require regulation." That's according to the editorial, "Save the RTs!" for the August issue of RT Magazine by Marian Benjamin.

I guess I have a couple thoughts on this. For one thing, if the deregulation of the RT profession is so important, then why did Jennifer Granholm sign on to legislation to license Michigan RTs. Why is it necessary to force us to pay $175 a year for a license if what we do isn't necessary? So we're basically paying $175 a year so you can deregulate us? That's not money well invested. Now it looks more than ever like the legislation was passed simply to raise more money for the state.

I also believe that about 80 percent of what we do is a waste of time or delays time. I'm referring to breathing treatments for any of these reasons. It seems like Albuterol is among the most abused medicine in the hospital. I also don't think it requires a person getting paid $20 an hour with respiratory therapy training to babysit a patient during a breathing treatment either. However, this is the cost of doing business. Because while 80 percent are non indicated, that one time a respiratory therapist walks into a room, sees that something isn't right with the patient (something a high school educated on the job trainee wouldn't recognize), and starts a chain of events to fixing the patient, is worth that cost of doing business. Respiratory therapists have saved many lives this way, and in turn a lot of money.
\
There's also the other side of respiratory therapy, the side that involves doing CPR, intubating, managing airways, and managing ventilators. You can pull anyone off the streets to push ventilator buttons, but you can't pull just anyone off the street to perform the critical thinking skills necessary to speed a patients recovery.

Too often what we respiratory therapists do goes unnoticed. Most patients probably don't even know who we are nor what we do. Yet we are there behind the scenes, at the head of the bed, saving lives. So perhaps member of the ORR are among this bunch. To deregulate our profession would result in the opposite effect I think the ORR is yearning for. What do you think?

3 comments:

Is Michigan clueless, how many professions does it want to push out of the state? First it was the automobile industry, now healthcare professionals?Initiatives like this encourage our colleagues to leave the state or the profession itself, I have seen this many times. This is sad and reinforces why we need to be advocates of our profession. I believe this will continue to happen in other states as long as respiratory therapy is perceived as a task or service based job, rather than a knowledge based profession.

Is Michigan clueless, how many professions does it want to push out of the state? First it was the automobile industry, now healthcare professionals?

Initiatives like this encourage our colleagues to leave the state or the profession itself, I have seen this many times.

This is sad and reinforces why we need to be advocates of our profession. I believe this will continue to happen in other states as long as respiratory therapy is perceived as a task or service based job, rather than a knowledge based profession.

This will not be good for Michigan, and it could set a precedent for other states to do the same if this goes through. It will be up to the hospitals to do a more than thorough screening of new hire RT's, and if they hire someone who really doesn't know or care about what they are doing then the patient will pay the cost of the hospital's negligence. I started my RT career in Michigan before licensure at $8.65/hr. I have worked with people who were hired, and didn't know to run a basic neb. Fortunately, these people did not last long at the hospital I worked for but I worry for patients at hospitals that don't care. From a business standpoint it makes sense for hospitals to seek out people who are willing to do the job for pennies on the dollar vs accredited professionals who they have to pay more to do the same job. This where our profession must stand up and demand better for ourselves and our patients.